David Braben Interview

"If you'd asked me at the time 'what do you think Elite will be remembered for?' it would be the 3D," David Braben explains "The 3D was the big thing."

Twenty five years on from the release of the classic space trading-shooter hybrid, it is perhaps the open-world nature of the title which stands out as the most progressive achievement. But as David Braben tells me, it was the 3D aspect that he and co-creator Ian Bell were eager to keep under wraps. "We were very secretive at the time because we were afraid that the reason there hadn't been any 3D games was that people hadn't realised it was possible," he says "[Elite] was one of the first 3D games." It was predated by one or two pseudo-3D games, largely featuring bitmaps that grew bigger and smaller when required, as well as some flight simulators ("very little more than a horizon line and a farting noise for the throttle, the technology wasn't really there to draw 3D aeroplanes"); but true 3D had only been seen in arcade titles like Battlezone. Bringing it to home computers was a different matter.

The main issue was performance. Even something as simple as a Cobra Mk III would take several seconds to draw on the BBC Micro - clearly far from ideal for a fast-paced space game. "One of the things I'd appreciated very early on was that if you could make a line-draw go quickly, 3D isn't actually a problem" David explains, "So with Elite a lot of the time was actually spent optimising that."

With 3D taking the limelight, other impressive aspects of the title were temporarily lost as the attention fell on this technological innovation. "Looking back at the games then, [they] were so incredibly linear it's the very fact that [Elite] was not linear at all that made it interesting" says David, "But it's not that other people hadn't had ideas for great games, it's just that they were blocked by the inability to get them published."

From Small Acorns ...

In 1984, with the gaming industry still in its infancy, publishers were resistant to any games which were not clones of previous arcade titles. Indeed, many of the publishers were not even games specialists at all, but were from other areas such as the music industry. "It's that mindset which changed. Nowadays people are actually open to really quite new ideas ... new ideas can work really well," David says "Back then there were fewer gatekeepers, and they had very, very set ways."

As a result, Elite was certainly not a 'publishers game.' Indeed, it initially fell foul of the prevailing attitude of conservatism when it was offered to Thorn EMI. "They were very cool on it," David tells me, "They said 'we want multiple lives, it's silly that you get punished so badly if you die' ... they really, I think, didn't get the idea of saves." Although impressed with Elite as a technical demo, the lack of an arcade feel was enough to put Thorn EMI off. There was no score, it took a long time to play: "The reasons they were cool on it, I would say are it's key features," laughs David.

Next, Braben and Bell took their game to AcornSoft. Although the company were close by, the pair had initially been wary of offering Elite to a publisher who only released games for the BBC Micro - a small percentage of the total market. After the Thorn EMI brush-off, however, AcornSoft were approached, and they reacted extremely favourably. "The reception we got could not have been more different," says David "I felt really positive ... these guys got it straight away, the sorts of questions they were asking showed they really got it." AcornSoft had a different mentality and, compared to some of the publishing behemoths, a more amateurish set-up ("but were all the better for that"); they were precisely the type of company to see the great potential in Elite: "It wasn't really a case of 'if', it was a case of 'when?' and 'how much?'"